by Ruth Park
‘That guy sure plays a mean han!’ I heard some sprinter mumble as we streamed into the zendo. I tried to hesitate on the threshold, to savour this moment of which I had often dreamed as I meditated alone on my island verandah. At last to be meditating with other people of the same mind! But there was no chance to hesitate. I was swept onwards, and in a moment was sitting on my black cushion, facing a dim wall, sinking into the familiar darkness of deep meditation. Down, down past the receding sounds, the visual illusions known as makyo which are often startling and beautiful but must be disregarded, into the silence where breath almost ceases, and the mind is completely at rest.
Buddhist meditation is so different from Christian meditation (which I had also done extensively in my Catholic days), that it would more correctly be called contemplation. In this practice there is no specific purpose or goal. It exists of itself and what comes from it exists of itself also. When pressed for a why and wherefore, questions which rise from irrepressible human curiosity, a great teacher of the past, Nangaku, said that everything we do is zazen, provided we do it singlemindedly. A rock or a plant does this all the time. But as our monkey minds have difficulty being concentrated, we must practice.
This is not news to any of us. Every sage who ever lived said the same thing. One thinks, for instance, of St Benedict’s ‘Work is prayer’. But Soto Zen, for me at least, was the simplest way.
Though in the following six years I was to travel to Japan four times, twice studying in monasteries, each time sitting zazen with other students, when I think of a zendo it is that vast shadowy room in Page Street, San Francisco. Once the basement of the Jewish hostel, it had become in all ways Japanese, empty, cold, with raised platforms around the walls, bearing the round, pleat-sided cushions used for meditation, placed in neat rows. With no difficulty I can bring before my inward eye the golden wood floor, the pale wheaten hue of the black-bound tatami on the platforms, the black cushions. I smell the air with its faint scent of incense and undisturbed chill. And always, no matter what country I am in, when I begin my daily meditation I return there.
Once a week we had a free half day, and one week I wandered along to the Examiner office, the newspaper that had offered me a job in the early years of the second World War. I was still grateful for that generous offer form the San Francisco Examiner, for although Pearl Harbour intervened, stopping dead all travel, and I was not able to take it up, the very knowledge that someone wanted me, young, female, and far away as I was, stiffened my spine and sent me forth to try my luck elsewhere.
But what if I had been able to accept that position, had set out for San Francisco, as I was all ready to do? If the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour had occurred just a week or two later? I would have been marooned in the States for the duration of the war, and as I was at the prime marrying age, probably would have married an American. On such an unpredictable occurrence had the pivot of my life been poised.
I thought I’d walk down to the Bay, which, although located within eyeshot of Zen Center, had always been invisible in fog or smog. The streets were shabby, industrialised, rather like Sydney’s dockland. Both cities had been born of the sea. As I watched, the smog broke up into smoky lacunae, and a tremulous wind rose, smelling of rusty ships and unfresh shores.
Had my life been lived in San Francisco would I have been a writer? As usual when I begin to ponder life’s puzzles, my thoughts drifted also to the puzzle of writing, a passion I have never understood. Is it just a human instinct for storytelling, as universally we have a powerful instinct for story-hearing?
With me there had always been a confluence of two streams, literary and personal, and I had taken great risks for both. Yet that unappeasable thing within me that needed to write had never required fame or success. The writing was sufficient. Once a book had been published I never willingly looked at it again.
What had I always wanted to write? What kind of thing?
It seemed I didn’t care. All I wanted was to write stories, short or long, fact or fiction, in which the reader could walk about, see a familiar reflection in the looking-glass, say, ‘Oh, yes, I know! I’ve been here all the time but didn’t realise it.’
The only thing you have to offer another human being is your own state of mind. And the state of my mind had been gladness, gladness about the world I was in, and the fact that I was in it.
Only the evening before, the teacher had spoken about enlightenment, how it does not change the person, merely his comprehension of the world and himself. He quoted the saying of a truly enlightened person: ‘Where we were ice we are now water, of exactly the same substance but with different freedoms.’
With a rush of joy I felt that of late I was thawing a little. Surely I had realised some little thing here and there, about writing and myself? Before I knew it, the idea had sneaked up on me. I was preening.
Fortunately, after a while I was approached by one of San Francisco’s many student beggars, beautiful, well-fed, clean, wearing those magnificently tooled leather Texan range boots that cost $US600.
Gently he asked, ‘Would you give me fifty cents, ma’am, to help me buy a ticket to Santa Barbara?’
‘What say you give me fifty cents instead?’ I asked, teasing.
He looked at me in consternation. Probably he had never been asked for money in his life. He walked slowly away.
‘Well, you shameless little fraud!’ I thought. And then, ‘Hey, hey! Watch it! If he’s a fraud that’s his problem. Yours is quite different, and there’s no need to have it at all.’
So I went quickly after him and gave him the fifty cents.
Ruth Park, aged twenty six
Anne Niland, eighteen months, on Collaroy Beach at Wits’ End
Rory Niland, B.Sc. a week after his father’s sudden death
Deborah and Kilmeny Niland, fifteen months old
D’Arcy Niland and second son, Patrick, thirteen months old
‘How did a man get into this?’ D’Arcy Niland, aged twenty-four. Anne Niland aged two months
Anne and Rory Niland, at Petersham, where we lived next door to Gilles de Rais
D’Arcy Niland, at the time of writing Call Me When the Cross Turns Over
Barbara Lucy Egan, aged seventeen. D’Arcy Niland’s mother
Barbara in her thirties, with her sister Bid, the presbytery housekeeper with the tired feet
D’Arcy Niland and actor Peter Finch, discussing their copyboy days on The Sun, 1956
Elizabeth (Ida Osbourne). ‘The fair and lightly sparkling girl’ of the ABC’s Children’s Session
Beresford Niland, aged nineteen. Our constant companion
Interviewing Surry Hills residents about the new housing scheme, 1951
Bringing the twins home from New Zealand, 1952
Opening of first Housing Commission blocks of flats in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, 1951. Residents whose existing terrace homes had been demolished were dubious
D’ Arcy Niland with Kilmeny and Deborah. ‘Posterity might judge that being a father was more important than being a novelist.’
Bertha Lawson, wife of Henry, publisher’s sales representative 1907 (Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Will Lawson, unrelated writer who looked after Bertha in her last years
Dame Mary Gilmore when she was a journalist on The Worker (Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Copy of letter written in 1947 by Mary Gilmore to Ruth Park
Shunryu Suzuki, the old man with one sad eye and one merry eye
Zen Center, Page St, San Francisco
Remains of convict settlement at Kingston, Norfolk Island. Nepean Island to left, Phillip Island at centre. Drawing by Cedric Emanuel
Quality Row, Norfolk Island. Officers’ houses of the Second Settlement, now mostly restored. Drawing by Cedric Emanuel
Ruined house on Quality Row, still to be restored to former elegance. Drawing by Cedric Emanuel
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